Carrol makes a good point that even the Mid-West would be better off under
grass. I don't doubt that it's in part because the farming practices of
the last couple hundred years have destroyed much of the humous in the soil
that so much water is needed to keep the crops alive.
Australia never had much soil in the first place, so you can imagine the
volumes of water that are required to keep crop roots alive. (I keep
nearly killing my tomatoes by not remembering to water them heavily every
few days...)
Rob, I'd say it's for the very reason that it has so little topsoil that Oz
makes a good grazing country. (Note my mention of how well-suited to small
meat animals the thin highland soils are.) How are you going to
efficiently grow crops here? Can't be done -- hence, I suppose, all the
(completely flavourless) hydroponic veggies we get, here. Where they're
getting all that water I shudder to wonder...
No, sheep (especially breeds who can survive on little water) are a good
idea, here. The problem has been overstocking. Where there's almost no
rain you have to give grasses time to recover. The Anglos who came here
have been stocking the land as though it were England. Turks would have
understood this place. In fact almost anyone but north-western Europeans
would have had a better understanding of how many sheep you can raise per
acre when you can't count on rain.
That the Anglos have persisted in their bad practice in spite of having
learned better is due, no doubt, to having to export to stay alive, as you
note.
cheers,
Joanna
At 01:03 09-03-01, you wrote:
>G'day meat eaters,
>
>Sez Carroll,
>
> > Actually, the only 'crop' that should be grown on The Great Plains is
> > grass for the most part. Certainly not wheat and corn. Water!!!!!!! The
> > ancient aquifers are being destroyed and are irreplacable. I believe
> > huge areas of China are not appropriate for grain production.
> >
> > Usaians eat far too much meat -- and it need not be so tender, but meat
> > raised as Joanna suggests (plus cattle in reasonable numbers on what are
> > or should be grasslamds rather than plowed lands) must always remain a
> > core part of the human diet for ecological reasons.
>
>I think this is right for parts European and North American, but Australia,
>being the gnarled old chunk of land that it is, has almost no top-soil, and
>cloven-hoofed animals strip what's left very quickly. We're big meat eaters
>(though less so all the time), but we export a lot of beef and mutton because
>we have to. We're very much a 'commodity economy' (one reason we're still so
>vulnerable to currency volatility - an Oz'll get you 50 cents at the moment)
>and we're just the place that needs to find other ways of paying for itself,
>which is just the thing we can't do in a world where others
>(twenty-five-year-old boys who call themselves currency experts or floor
>traders) tell us what our 'comparative advantage' is.
>
>Another example of just how irrational economic rationalism is. "invisible
>hand' my arse ...
>
>Cheers,
>Rob.
>
>_______________________________________________
>CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
www.overlookhouse.com
_______________________________________________
CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
